According to American Airlines vice president of planning Vasu Raja, the Airbus A380 was even too large for the biggest airline in the world. American Airlines operates a fleet of 956 aircraft.

"The Boeing 777-300 is the biggest size airplane that fits into our network," Raja told us.

American's Boeing 777-300ERs are configured with 304 seats per plane. To put that into perspective, British Airways A380s fly with 165 more while some Emirates A380s fly with 300 more seats.

Planes like the A380 are designed to feed large numbers of passengers into a central mega-hub where they are connected to destinations around the world. Most of the plane's operators possess this trait. For example, Emirates has Dubai, Singapore Airlines has Changi, Qatar has Doha, and Korean Air has Incheon.

"Take British Airways for example, for them, they funnel the world into London Heathrow and send them forth," Raja said. "They are probably the only airline where the A380 legitimately makes economic sense. They are also the largest operator of the Boeing 747 for the same reason."

According to Raja, who is in charge of developing American's global network strategy, the airline multi-hub strategy makes the A380 a tough sell.

"The reality is that we don't just funnel all of our traffic into one hub," he said."We operate out of nine different hubs in the US and because of that there's no single hub where you can pool 500 people's worth of demand every single day and go make that work."

Raja added, "if you could do it, you'd do it on a few routes but not enough to go buy the 20 or 30 or 40 airplanes you would need in order to justify having the infrastructure of an airplane like that."

"The first issue would be whenever we buy airplanes, especially a new airplane type is the amount of infrastructure it takes to go and support it," Raja said. "You need to have a dedicated pool of pilots, a pilot training regime, fixed maintenance, a maintenance program around it, a certain amount of spare parts."

"All of that is a huge degree of fixed cost so want to have that scale over a number of units," Raja added.

At the end of the day, the A380's cost, infrastructure needs, and pressure to generate passenger demand make the plane too much of a risk.

"It's hard to see a place where you're worth it taking that kind of expense with that kind of demand and even if the yields are alright you can take a good market and make it negative pretty fast," Raja said.